side income

Welcome to my Passive Income report for May 2018. I am excited to report growth in May and am looking forward to June. May was a busy month personally, so I didn’t get to spend as much time on growing passive income streams as I would like, but it is nice to see that growth can still happen if I continue to produce more content that has value.

I am realizing that I need to increase the production value of my YouTube videos. The content is great, but the production value is just lazy. Other creators are stepping up their production quite a bit. People are expecting more out of the videos they watch. I need to focus more on producing an all around great video rather than just trying to get something out in a timely manner.

Traffic to my websites saw a boost in May, but I need to be more consistent with creating content there as well. Having videos transcribed has helped quite a bit with search engine ranking but a direct transcription of a video is not providing the best experience for those who land on this written content. I need to take my videos and turn them into a well-organized article with quality photography when necessary.

It’s hard to do all things well. That is why most people focus on only doing one or two things to the best of their ability. I have never been that way. I want to do all things and do them to the best of my ability, but I know that to be near impossible. I give myself eight hours each day to work and I don’t work weekends. I either need more manpower or I need to scale back in a few areas. I guess I have some thinking to do over the next few weeks.

Going into June, I have a lot on my calendar in regards to family time. We have something scheduled each weekend through the end of summer with family events and other short trips scattered throughout June and July. It is going to be hard to focus on Passive Income Growth so I will take time when I can find it to create. Summer is a prime example of why I am doing this. I will have extra income in June and July because I have done this work. Passive Income is providing more freedom for me this year than I had last year, and that was the goal. I am getting closer to replacing my families income needs and feel 100% confident that I will be able to pull that off well before the end of this year.

Later this year I will bottle up everything I learned growing my Passive Income (Side Income) from a few hundred dollars to what it is now in under a years time. People ask me about these monthly Passive Income Reports all of the time. I know there is a huge need for education on building passive income streams from someone who actually has proof they are doing it.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

May 2018 Side Income Total – $4,698.92 (+17.33%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $1,378.28 (+39.55%) Subscribers: 31,567 (+5.57%) Watch Time: 1,507,912 Minutes (+28.93%)
We have released a lot of videos over the last few months and the numbers are reflecting that. We broke through the 30,000 subscriber mark as well. This is a huge milestone and has given me a fierce desire to grow this channel. I still feel that I need to narrow down the topics a bit to appeal more to a specific audience. With over 1.5 million minutes consumed each month, we should be growing at a subscriber rate greater than 5%.

Ditch Auto – $522.90 (+24.78%) Subscribers: 27,311 (+5.30%) Watch Time: 904,417 Minutes (+11.14%)
I was able to get a few new videos live this month. I am looking more into affiliate programs in the photography space to grow revenues and seek out new opportunities. A video I did for a Peak Designs Camera Bag brought in over $175 in affiliate commission. Over the next few months, I am going to try to bring on a few more affiliate programs for products I believe in.

Jerad Hill – $57.64 (+27.72%) Subscribers: 5302 (+0.34%) Watch Time: 40,005 Minutes (+7.53%)
I didn’t upload as much in May to this channel as I have in the previous few months, but the transcriptions of the videos I have been posting have been helping grow traffic to my blog, which has these videos embedded. My income reports have also been getting talked about a bit which has resulted in more views and subscribers. Looking forward to growing this channel as I would love to catch up to State of Tech and Ditch Auto.

AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1,718 (+3.99%) Watch Time: 34,106 Minutes (+4.51%)
AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I am not sure what I want to do with this channel. I have not been doing much with Cryptocurrency Mining over the last few months other than just making sure my mining rigs continue to run. I sold off some of the hardware so I only have two rigs left. I think I am going to need to pivot and come up with another topic for this channel in order to keep moving forward with it.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $804.83 (-4.28%)
This last month I have been publishing a lot of informational content rather than product reviews which is where most of my Amazon revenue comes from. I need to start doing a better job representing products in my videos without the video having to be a review for an exact product.
Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $42.10 (+42.9%)
As I mentioned last month, I have been publishing more content on the two sites I monetize with Adsense. This shows up in the numbers. Though it is only $42, that also represents a huge bump in traffic to these websites. In order for adsense revenue to almost double, traffic to the site had to almost double. I am glad to see some forward momentum after how the last several months have been.
Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $49.00 (-50%)
The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,300 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $163.17 (+32.97%)
Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has bottomed out here on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,300 on Udemy.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1,681.00 (+14.98%)
Over the last few months, I have started to build content for a few small affiliate programs that will eventually become their own category in this income report. The affiliate programs are for products I have reviewed or produced other content for. In the next few months, I will break apart this category a bit to further explain what it is made up of.

Investments

I didn’t touch my investments this month. My stock holdings in the Robinhood app grew at a decent rate but my cryptocurrency holdings decreased a bit after last months rebound. Nobody knows where Crypto is going. I know it is not going away, but it’s hard to tell where it will go in regards to value over the following months. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $10,402.92 (+13.24%)
Continuing to see good growth here. I did not put any money in this month so the improvement here is all market growth. Hopefully next month I can throw in an extra $500-$1,000 to purchase more stock. There were a few stocks that bottomed out in early May that I wish I had the extra money to buy as they saw a solid rebound in May. I need to make sure I have money set aside for opportunities I see like this.

Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,033.52 (-9.92%)
Last month I was happy to see things rebound a bit. There was not a lot of excitement here in May. I did sell off some of the GPUs from one of my Ethereum Mining Rigs and stopped mining ZCash altogether. I am continuing to mine with 375mh/s of power going to Ethereum.
If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

May was a pretty good month. All of these revenue streams continue to grow organically. I have not partnered with anyone or attempted to collaborate with other creators yet. I feel that this is one of the next areas of growth for me. There are opportunities for growth in these partnerships. I have used my location as an excuse and I need to stop there. There are creators near me, I just need to find them and partner with the ones who make sense.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

Welcome to my Passive Income report for April 2018. April was a month of reflection as I looked back over everything I have been doing over the past five months since I really started getting serious about replacing my regular income with passive income. Looking into how I have been spending my time revealed to me a few things which I will discuss here and explain how I plan to fix them.

The big elephant in the room is the topic of cryptocurrency. There were some huge opportunities for me in the crypto space which I took advantage of, but they were short-lived, kind-of. Though my cryptocurrency holdings are recovering well (see below), mining with the current equipment I have is getting more challenging. Though crypto pricing is back up to around where it was in early December of last year, the difficulty to mine has increased quite a bit. With that said, I am still able to turn a profit due to having paid off my mining rigs so quickly. With my current set up, I can still mine $1,500 US worth of crypto in a month. My electricity costs are about $400/mo so that puts me at a profit of $1,100 per month.

The mining rigs do not take much to keep up but with summer approaching, I have some big decisions to make with where they are currently running from. I need a proper cooling system to keep the rigs and the room temperature down. I estimate that increasing my electricity costs substantially right away. Last summer in Modesto, CA we had over three months of 95+ degree temperatures. It was 84 degrees out the other day and the room temperature near the rigs was 112 degrees. So in regards to cryptocurrency mining, I need to look at my options. I will explain more in my next Mining Update video on the State of Tech AltCast YouTube channel. What I really need is a solar solution.

Another source of income over the past few months has been my How to build a Mining Rig Course. With the crypto pricing correction and the crazy prices of mining hardware, the interest in mining has gone way down as well.

I have been putting out a lot of videos but this is the time of year where most will see a slight dip in their average view counts anyway. YouTube has been making a lot of changes to their suggestion algorithm which has helped some of my videos while at the same time hurting others. This is an ever-changing process toward growth.

This is why I am doing all of this on the side while keeping my core focus on Hill Media Group. I have learned a lot over the past six months, especially in the cryptocurrency world. I would not trade that new knowledge for anything. I’m still making money.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

April 2018 Side Income Total – $4,004.92 (-18.2%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $987.69 (-11.76%) Subscribers: 29,902 (+0.44%) Watch Time: 1,116,955 Minutes (-4.53%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. After a huge month of new content last month, April slowed a bit which brought me back to normal. Each month I am getting better at determining what content this audience wants.

Ditch Auto – $419.07 (-4.93%) Subscribers: 25,935 (+4.64) Watch Time: 813,763 Minutes (-1.67%)
Ditch Auto is a YouTube channel around the topic of Photography. I added a few videos in April but have not had much time to do more than review a few products. The product review videos do not do as well for YouTube growth as educational videos.

Jerad Hill – $45.13 (+5.27%) Subscribers: 5214 (+0.12%) Watch Time: 37,249 Minutes (+10.65%)
This is my personal channel. I started uploading more content this month but am having trouble with it being found. This channel is so old and has been unused so many times. I am starting to see very slow growth here. Trying to figure out my voice and what topics are best for me to focus on.

AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1562 (+8%) Watch Time: 32,634 Minutes (-49.59%)
AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. Growth is slow here due to the decrease in interest in mining Cryptocurrency. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 185,000. I feel like I will need to pivot here in order to regain growth and bring this channel to monetization.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $840.86 (-13.52%)
Nothing really new to report here except that I am playing around with my own redirect links to Amazon so I could more easily fix links when a product on Amazon goes out of stock. Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $29.46 (+6.7%)
I may finally have seen the bottom of the drop from Google’s Algorithm change earlier this year. I have been posting some of my videos on my websites with short articles which could also be helping. Next months report should show some additional growth here as well because I have been having some of my videos transcribed and that should help with SEO. Will be interesting to see if there was any value in doing that work.
Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $98.00 (-84.61%)
The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,200 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $122.71 (-63.43%)
Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,200 on Udemy.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1462.00 (+10.62%)
I am almost back to where things were before in this category. I am not selling mining hardware anymore. This category consists of passive income that comes in from various other past projects and content that I no longer work on growing.

Investments

I was right about last month being the bottom. Things have started to recover as you can see in my holdings below. I put an additional $500.00 into stocks with Robinhood but the rest of the growth was due to stocks recovering value. Crypto has recovered nicely with almost a 100% recovery over last month. I have not put any additional money into cryptocurrency but I have continued to mine crypto through the entire month of April. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $9,186.30 (+23.21%)
As I mentioned above, I put $500 into stocks this month and saw some recovery on some other stocks I had that dropped last month. This month I am up and it looks like that will continue into May.

Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,698.15 (+92.36%)
I was right about March being the bottom. As you can see, my crypto holdings are recovering at a nice pace. I am continuing to mine with 720mh/s of power going to Ethereum and 3,200 sols/s going to ZCash.
If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

April was a mixed bag. I still need to figure out a good flow for content release so my audiences know what to expect from me. I need to work on a path that I hope to guide them through. I really need to get serious about updating some of my older courses and producing some premium content for my students as well.

I am considering doing more than just reporting monthly on my progress. I have received a lot of questions from people who want to know more about what I am doing. In a perfect world, I would be producing videos a couple of times each week on this, but that just isn’t sustainable at this time. Maybe a thought for the future.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

March was an interesting month. We had a lot of Hill Media Group projects coming to a close so I focused on creating content. I put out a ton of videos in March and that shows in the numbers you see below. There are still a few passive income areas that finished correcting back to where they would normally be after the holidays and post-holiday sales.

I changed the name of this report from Side Income to Passive Income. The idea is that the income will grow into something that could become my main focus. Calling it side income makes it seem like something I don’t spend much time working on. The goal is to grow passive income streams that continue to pay me over time. As I continue to feed those passive income streams, that income will continue to grow and become an income source that will pay me even if I decide to take a month or two off on occasion.

With the large boost in content production, I am interested to see where Amazon Affiliate sales will go next month in April. Sometimes it can take some time before the increase in content and views result in more affiliate sales.

I still feel confident with how things are going so far in 2018. I have not had the motivation I had at the beginning of the year. I know that I need to get back to it and work on creating a new course. Hopefully, I can make more forward movement in April.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

March 2018 Side Income Total – $4,895.51 (-9.5%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $1,119.39 (+27.31%) Subscribers: 29,771 (+4.57%) Watch Time: 1,169,902 Minutes (+5.31%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. I added a lot of video content in March which is represented in the growth see this month.

Ditch Auto – $440.79 (+32.12%) Subscribers: 24,785 (+5.31) Watch Time: 827,560 Minutes (+17.57%)
My photography channel continues to lack content. I have not had time to put anything together for Ditch Auto. I started the monthly photo challenge but have not had the time to work on additional content and have not focused on any other photography content. This needs to change.

Jerad Hill – $42.87 (+9.02%) Subscribers: 5214 (+0.12%) Watch Time: 37,249 Minutes (+10.65%)
This is my personal channel. I started uploading more content this month but am having trouble with it being found. This channel is so old and has been unused so many times. I think it is going to take a lot of content and consistency to get it to bounce back.

AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1446 (+23.59%) Watch Time: 64,733 Minutes (+23.03%)
AltCast is a new channel started January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I have seen a lot of growth here due to a give-a-way that was pretty successful. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 155,000.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $972.33 (+13.69%)
The Cryptocurrency buzz has died down for sure but the new content produced for State of Tech has helped drive more affiliate sales this month. Ditch Auto is still going strong but I have not added new content. This month I also started posting videos on the website as well with a short write up and product affiliate links. I am hoping to see some growth in traffic to the websites as well.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $27.61 (-44.39%)
Google made a pretty sizeable algorithm change in January which put the hurt on one of my sites. As I mentioned above, I have started posting video content to my websites with small articles to work toward growing traffic back up on these sites.
Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $637.00 (-18.75%)
The Mining Rig course still continues to provide some income, though it is slowing down quite a bit. I need to produce a new course to help replace that income.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $335.52 (-46.22%)
Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. I messed around with Udemy’s marketing a bit and allowed Udemy to set sale pricing on my course. This led to more sales, but less revenue overall.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1320.00 (-28.65%)
I am almost back to where things were before in this category. I am not selling mining hardware anymore. This category consists of passive income that comes in from various other past projects and content that I no longer work on growing.

Investments

This was a rough month for my investment holdings in these two spaces. I didn’t put any money or even really pay much attention to my stocks in the Robinhood app so I lost a little bit there. Cryptocurrency continued to get hammered but I believe this is the bottom. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $7,455.90 (-2.22%)
In April I plan to start focusing on my stocks again. Hope to see some growth here and will also put more money in.

Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $3,482.12 (-36.66%)
Crypto has been hit hard this month and continues to take hits into April. I am still mining which contributes to growth in my holdings but I have lost a good portion of value from when it was at an all-time high in early January. I decided not to buy any Crypto in March. I will wait a bit longer to see what happens in April. If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

March was a good month for YouTube growth. My main focus was producing videos and we put out a lot of videos during this month which is why there was so much growth in this space. I find that it is too easy to work on things that do not contribute to passive income growth. I have to remember what the goal is and continue to work on what will get me there.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

Since I started publishing my passive income statements, people have been asking me how they can get started making money online. There are a lot of ways to make money online, but if you wanted to get started fast and are ambitious enough, these 5 tips on how to make $1,000 by next week could help you out.

In this video, I outline 5 Ways to Make $1,000 by next week. I discuss different methods and tactics, so hopefully one or more will make sense for you to try.

What are your thoughts? Have an idea or something to share? Post it in the comments!

Video Transcript:

Hey it’s Jerad and I have kind of a continuation on the whole like entrepreneurial freelance topics that I’ve been kind of posting videos on lately, and that is how to make $1,000 by next week. Now, sometimes we get in a pinch where we need some extra finances, some extra money or we lose a job or something comes up unexpected and we need to earn a little bit of extra money. Now, typically when that happens we kind of get into this hustle mode where we want to do anything and do everything to try and make some extra money.

But for those who haven’t had to actually go out and try and do that on their own, perhaps maybe you’ve just had a normal job for a long time, it can be kind of daunting because you haven’t had to do this before. You typically go to work and you get handed tasks and those tasks you achieve and then you get paid at the end of the week or the next week or something like that. So, when you actually have to kind of take matters into your own hands and seek out opportunities, it becomes a little daunting. And so I wanted to give you some tips on how you could get started and potentially even earn $1,000 or more within the next week depending on how hard you feel like hustling.

1. Post Your Skills on Fiverr.com

So the first thing is something you can do from home, it’s simply going on this website called fiverr.com, which is Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com, and if you have some skills that could be put to use there, you can get paid anywhere from five dollars on up for those skills depending on what they are. So they have topics such as graphic design, writing, music and audio, fun, lifestyle, they’ve got lots of different things that are on here, social media. Things that you can do easily but probably you already have some experience in and people will pay you as little as $5 and on up depending on the experience that you have and what you’re able to bring to the table.

For example, say you have an iPhone or like a phone with a decent camera on it, you can provide services like shooting a video for them, a product video or shooting a testimonial video or an explainer video on how to do something. You can create content that they could put on their website. You can write, you can offer your services as a writer even if you’re not a professional writer but just somebody who can do a decent job at writing, and you can write things for people. Write product reviews, write content for their website, there’s lots of things that you can do. Go over to fiverr.com and check that out, I’ve got a link for you in the description below so that you can check that out.

It’s definitely a way … I mean, if you’re doing $5 a job, $5 a job, you’re going to need a lot of jobs, but some of these you can add upgrades or add-ons to this where that $5 job becomes a $30 job or something like that. If most of the jobs are averaging around $30, that’s definitely going to make the path to $1,000 much shorter.

2. Make Money with Photography

The second is photography and I talked really briefly on Fiverr, the topic of Fiverr about that but photography. Most of us have smartphones that take pretty good images and we don’t have to necessarily be a professional photographer these days to take decent photos that people can use. Now, realtors and investors and there’s all sorts of different companies that are looking for photos of properties or things that are outside that they need for either their websites to sell or whatnot, you could call your local real estate office and say hey, I’m looking to take some pictures of properties, I have time available today, are there any properties that you need photos for.

Maybe they just got off the phone with their photographer who’s two weeks out or something like that and they need photos taken right away. If you have a modern phone, you can take some pictures for them and charge them a couple hundred dollars for your time and just deliver them the photos. Most of the realtors are taking photos on their smart phones but aren’t really that good at it, you can practice a little bit taking photos of your own home or your own property and go out and offer this for them. If you have a camera that’s better than an iPhone or something like that, like a DSLR camera, you’re even one step closer to making that $1,000 because the better the equipment that you have, you could probably charge a little bit more. Because, if you say, I’m going to use my cell phone to take pictures but don’t worry I take good pictures, here are some examples, you’re not going to get to charge as much as somebody who has a professional DSLR. So you’ll have to price yourself somewhere in there reasonably.

You can offer $50, tell the realtors look, I’ll go out and I’ll shoot photos of the home for you for $50 and if you don’t like them, then you don’t have to pay me, but if you do like them, I’d sure love to shoot more properties for you over the next week. And that can add up really quick and you can even say the next one I want to charge $80 or $100 to go and get photos. And there are YouTube videos talking about how to shoot real estate photography. You can pretty much figure out how to shoot anything as far as photography goes by watching a couple of YouTube videos. So don’t be afraid to kind of put yourself out there and think about the different ways that you can be shooting photos, maybe product photos. You can call a local business such as like a consignment store or a thrift store and say hey, I’d love to come in and take a lot of photos of the stuff that you offer for sale and help you get them up on your Facebook page.

There are so many ways that you can use photography even if all you have as a smartphone so that you can get paid and help these companies, these businesses around the area get more exposure for their stuff. A lot of these people, these business owners just don’t think about it, they don’t think that they can afford it or whatnot. But because you’re trying to kind of get in at a lower price and kind of get started, you can offer them something that’s affordable to them.

3. Do Work for Family and Friends

Number three is probably the best option here, which is to ask family and friends. You never know what somebody has a need for and a lot of times people only associate what they know about you as something that you can do. So say, for example, you are a teacher and it’s the summertime and you want to earn a little bit extra money during the summer, most people just think of you as a teacher. They don’t think that maybe how to take decent photos with your smartphone so you can take photos for them or maybe there’s some other thing that how to do. Maybe you’re good at woodworking or you’re a little bit younger and you have some good labor left in you, and you can go and do some work on yard for them.

There’s a lot of things that you can do that most people might not know that you’re capable of doing and they aren’t going to know unless you ask them or you tell them. You can ask your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, other people that are around, post it to social media and ask and say hey, does anybody have any projects that they need help with. Do you need work done on this or that or whatnot and see what people have to say, and then you could say hey, I can help with that. Most people aren’t going to have enough work for you to like pay you 40 hours a week and that’s okay. If they have five hours of work for you or even just two hours of work for you, and they pay you 20 or $30 an hour because it’s short-term work, which means you can typically get paid more hourly for that because it’s a short-term project. And you can price per project not the hourly.

So, if you say, that’s going to take about two hours, why don’t you pay me 50 bucks. That’s $25 an hour and if somebody that becomes valuable to them, it would have taken them many more hours to do it themselves or to do it by themselves, it’s going to be worth at 50 bucks. Think about pricing based on the project that they have not necessarily on hourly. Because if minimum wages in your area is say like $10 or $12 or $13 an hour, and you say well, just pay me minimum wage, you’re going to be working pretty hard for a short period of time. So think about charging based on the project or whatever the job is, not based on the amount of time. Of course, the time and everything in the project is part of that but think about saying like I’ll do that for $50 instead of saying, that’s $2 or that’s 2 hours and say $15 an hour that’s 30 bucks, you just made $20 extra by making it a project fee instead.

4. Find jobs on Craigslist or Facebook

Number four is answering and doing odd jobs found on like classifieds or Craigslist. There’s a whole section on Craigslist where people post needs for certain jobs. I’ve read into a lot of them and some of them are kind of weird but you can definitely find something interesting too there. There are companies that need people to sit in on focus groups and stuff like that, there’s lots of opportunities for things there that you could find on Craigslist or perhaps in the classified section of your local newspaper.

People post short-term jobs, I remember this was huge when I was younger. When I was a teenager, I would look in the classifieds for any jobs that somebody might have there temporary and that’s how I ended up starting to go and mow yards and do yard work for people when I was 12 years old. I was going all over the neighborhoods with the lawn mower, pushing it up and down the street mowing lawns and all that stuff making money as a 12-year-old, and it’s definitely something that you can do as an adult to make some extra money especially if you already have the equipment. But of course be careful because who knows what people are posting, you want to make sure you don’t get yourself into a dangerous situation. Make sure to kind of vet whatever job that is before you just randomly show up by yourself. You want to be safe.

5. Drive for Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash

Number five is to do Uber or Lyft. A lot of people have been doing this in making extra money and there’s a lot of conflicting information out there as to whether people are actually making money doing this or if they’re actually just wearing out their vehicle, and in making money in the moment but their vehicle’s going to wear out sooner. I think that it really depends on where you’re located. If you live in a small town and you’re going to Uber and Lyft around there, you might not make much money because people aren’t traveling too far, they’re maybe just going to and from work. It’s not a very busy area so the rate in which you’re getting paid for your time is not very high.

But if you live near a bigger town or city where there is a airport and there’s bigger companies there, for example, I live in the Central Valley, California and San Francisco is about an hour and a half away, San Jose about the same. If you go into one of those areas, you can earn a lot more and get a lot more rides and that makes it worth it. The area is smaller but it’s busier, which means not nearly as much wear and tear on your vehicle as maybe being in a smaller town where your rides are longer. You’re going to get a lot more rides in a shorter period of time and then of course those airport rides and some of those rides that may end up taking them from one bigger city to another bigger city is going to result in a bigger pay for the right as well.

Of course there’s a little bit of time involved in getting approved and all that stuff but those are things you can almost get done in the matter of a day or two if you’re very vigilant. And going down and getting your vehicle inspected, signing up through the Uber or Lyft app or even both and going down and getting that taken care of. I know that there’s typically like a $30 or so fee for getting your vehicle inspected but I know from the experience of people that are really close to me, that you can go and make 4 or $500 in a day if you live near a big area and are okay with driving non-stop for pretty much eight hours in a day. But that’s a way to make money and they’ll pay you out next to the same day and you can get paid really quickly. Yeah, it’s some wear and tear on your vehicle but if you put away a little bit of that every time you go out and drive, you’re going to have money there for repairs or upgrades to your vehicle later on as you need.

So that’s five ways that you can make a thousand dollars by next week. When you get in a pinch, definitely don’t sit on your hands, be proactive, do something about it and you’ll have the opportunity to go and make a little bit of side income. You might find something that you actually enjoy doing and can do over the long haul and that would start to alleviate the stress of putting all of your financial burdens on one job. Spreading that out across a couple of jobs sometimes makes it easier and makes those financial goals of yours more attainable.

Let me know what you think down in the comment section below. Are these valid, have you tried some of these, what are your tips if you have maybe that other people can learn from. Share that down in the comment section below, I’d love to hear those and also see what everybody else is doing out there to earn extra money. That’s going to do it for this video so make sure to click that subscribe button and the little bell next to it if you want to be notified when I put out new videos. Thanks again and I hope to see you back soon.

February was definitely a reality check that came quick. I knew that January was a Unicorn Month and stated that in last months side income report. I just don’t like seeing red. I am still turning a profit and am up compared to last year, but there is a lot of red in this months report.

I spent most of February concentrating on content. I also played around with Live Streaming quite a bit. One of my plans over the next few months is to start doing some live streaming. I am still trying to figure out what I want to do in that space. My studio is now set up to live stream.

I burned out on buying and selling Cryptocurrency Mining equipment. It was a lot to keep up with and I did not want it occupying so much of my mental bandwidth. By the end of the month, I had sold off the remaining inventory I had. I still have my small mining farm and have been trying to decide what to do with that. It’s earning an income but when the days start to warm up I will need to figure out a solution for cooling the warehouse.

This has also been kind of a tough month for my investments. The stock market corrected quite harshly this month. I was not hit too hard because in December I sold off most of my stocks that had not seen at least 10% growth in the previous quarter so I got lucky there. The stocks I still hold did not get hit too hard and by the end of February, they had completely recovered.

Cryptocurrency continues to get hammered as well. I am still showing an increase in my holdings because I continue to mine Ethereum and ZCash, but I did lose quite a bit. I hope that the coming months bring some recovery to that market.

March will bring a new challenges as I continue to work on content for these projects in an attempt to grow them. I recognize where most of the opportunity for growth is, I just need the time to put in the work.

I am still thrilled with how things are going so far in 2018. The year started off kind of crazy but I can now start to dig into some of my longer-term plans for side income growth. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

February 2018 Side Income Total – $5,409.45 (-35.09%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $879.27 (-2.51%) Subscribers: 28471 (+7.28%) Watch Time: 1,110,876 Minutes (-20.63%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. I added a few videos in February, but nothing that saw much traction. A few other videos have started to see some growth. I hope to get more content up in March.

Ditch Auto – $333.63 (-6.96%) Subscribers: 23536 (+6.72) Watch Time: 703,892 Minutes (-20.26%)
My photography channel continues to lack content. I have not had time to put anything together for Ditch Auto. I will be starting a monthly photo challenge in March so I hope to be able to produce some content around the monthly challenges.

Jerad Hill – $33.83 (+30.87%) Subscribers: 5208 (+9.96%) Watch Time: 33,665 Minutes (+1.04%)
This is my personal channel. I started uploading a few videos here and there with plans to get more serious in March.

AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1170 (+166.51%) Watch Time: 52,661 Minutes (+201.41%)
AltCast is a new channel started January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I have seen a lot of growth here due to a give-a-way that was pretty successful. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 120,000.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $855.23 (-49.83%)
The Cryptocurrency buzz is slowing so this income channel cooled off a bit. I also have not spent much time creating new content for State of Tech or Ditch Auto which are two of the bigger driving forces behind Amazon Affiliate purchases for my account.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $49.65 (-46.94%)
Google made a pretty sizeable algorithm change in January which put the hurt on one of my sites. State of Tech’s organic traffic basically cut in half. The algorithm change favors sites that have frequent updates and State of Tech has not had much fresh content lately. I plan to change that over the next few months to regain some ground.
Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $784.00 (-21.99%)
The Mining Rig course still continues to provide some income. It has started to taper off likely due to the interest in mining starting to slow.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $623.84 (-35.58%)
Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. I have been learning how Udemy showcases courses that decide to use their own pricing rather than allowing Udemy to run sales. I hope to discuss this later in a blog post on my experiences with using Udemy for my online courses.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1850.00 (-43.53%)
As I mentioned earlier in this report, I have just about sold off the rest of my mining equipment that I purchased to resell. I still have my mining rigs, but that is about it. It was a lot of work to find mining hardware and to resell it. This category is going to drop off a lot in the next month as I don’t have any current plans to add any additional side income channels for now.

Investments

This is a new category that I am not including in my side income revenue because these are investments. In my opinion, these investments will not become income until I cash them out. In the future, I may break this out on its own as I have more content for this area. I have been investing on my own for a few years but I have not really taken it very seriously until late last year.

Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $7,625.02 (+16.40%)
In December I sold off all stocks that were not performing outstanding to fund the purchase of mining equipment for resale. This ended up working out to my benefit as there was a decent market correction in February. I would have lost close to 20%. Instead, I lost about 5% and then quickly regained that and more by the end of the month.

Cryptocurrency – Holdings: 5,497.37 (+36.09%)
Crypto has been hit hard this month and continues to take hits into March. I am still mining which contributes to growth in my holdings but I have lost a good portion of value from when it was at an all-time high in early January. I will likely buy in during March as the prices are too low not to. If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

February was a good month. Though it was quite a bit lower than January, I didn’t let my expectations get in the way of remaining grounded. I was able to get a lot accomplished in February, but I did have a few setbacks. The emotional high I was riding from things going so well in December and January wore off and I started to feel it. I try hard not to be, but I can easily be affected by a loss of momentum. I am trying to figure out how to course correct when I do lose momentum.

March will be interesting because a lot of Hill Media Group projects will be coming to a close. That will free up a lot of time to work on side projects. I need to continue to work on growing Hill Media Group, but the extra time will be nice to test out a few things.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

YouTube just changed the monetization standards for new and existing YouTube channels. To monetize your YouTube channel you now must have 1000 subscribers and over 4,000 hours of viewed content in the past 365 days. That means 240,000 minutes of your content must be consumed in the past year in order to be elegible to monetize your content with ads. People are seriously freaking out.

To me, this means that we all need to step up our game. People who are not serious are not going to try. I’m ok with that. In today’s video, I discuss these new guidelines and give you 5 ways you can take things to the next level with your YouTube channel so you can get 1000 subscribers and the 4,000 watch hours needed to be a YouTube Partner Creator.

The winds are a-changin’. This January was what I will call a Unicorn Month. A Unicorn Month is a month where things were definitely out of the ordinary. I am always watching for opportunities and sometimes what I thought was the opportunity actually turned out to be something else.

In December, I started mining cryptocurrency. There has been a lot of people getting into mining and that has put real strains on the supply of mining hardware. This was already happening when I started buying my initial equipment. I had a lot of people come out of the woodworks wanting information about mining. I produced a video course titled “How to Build an Ethereum Mining Rig” which performed well during the month of January. I also started looking for alternative suppliers of Graphics Cards for Mining Computers. I was fortunate enough to get a large order of them, so I sold them on Amazon and eBay for a profit. I was able to sell so many of them that I paid for all of my mining equipment and am up about $2500 at the time of writing this.

I also started producing a lot of content on the topic of Crypto Mining on YouTube. I enjoy teaching and learning so it just made sense to start producing videos. I am also using these videos to market the course I mentioned earlier.

My YouTube channels continued to grow and saw consistent traffic as the holiday season came to a close. I saw a dip toward the end of January. Revenue was down since the holidays were over so from here on out the monetization revenue will reflect more realistic numbers. A major goal is to get that back up with content that is not so seasonal.

The growth I saw in December and the Unicorn month of January will offer me some additional freedom going into February so I can focus a bit more on my side income streams in between taking care of my existing clients with Hill Media Group. Not having to worry so much about bringing in new clients for a couple of months will give me that extra focus I need to keep things moving forward.

With that said, here is my Side Income Report for January of 2018. This year is off to a great start. In February I have started filming videos on a variety of topics that I post to this website as well as my personal YouTube Channel. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

January 2018 Side Income Total – $8,334.72 (+76.9%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $901.99 (-39.89%) Subscribers: 26537 (+9.35%) Watch Time: 1,399,652 Minutes (+2.49%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. There were a few videos added to the channel this month but my focus was on other channels.

Ditch Auto – $358.61 (-49.65%) Subscribers: 22053 (+6.37) Watch Time: 882,775 Minutes (-15.49%)
This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials. Not a lot of content has been added to Ditch Auto this month.

Jerad Hill – $25.85 (-33.01%) Subscribers: 4736 (+2.35%) Watch Time: 33,316 Minutes (-8.68%)
This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. In February I plan to start producing a daily video. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet but I am sure it will eventually add to growth.

AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 439 (+100%) Watch Time: 17,471 Minutes (+100%)
AltCast is a new channel started January 2018 with a focus on alternative forms of investing and cryptocurrency mining. This channel will not be monetizable through YouTube until I reach 1,000 subscribers and hit 4,000 watch hours for the year.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $1,704 .69 (+67.91%)
I saw a huge boost in Amazon Affiliate sales this month due to the success of my Cryptocurrency Mining videos and the Mining Course. People were using my links to purchase parts to build their mining rigs. On top of that, I think that a lot of people received Amazon gift cards for Christmas and were spending them on items they found through my content.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $93.58 (-49.62%)
I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $1,005.00 (+172.57%)
The “How to Build an Ethereum Mining” course drove the growth this month. Cryptocurrency has received a lot of attention which has driven a lot of traffic to my videos which market my course. I have not done any marketing of this course yet other than linking to it from my YouTube videos.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $968.48 (+196.93%)
I decided to add my Ethereum Mining course to Udemy as well. Udemy organic drove most of the traffic to this course which means I received a much smaller portion of the sales than I would on my own website It took 3x the signups to Udemy to make this amount compared to what it takes on my own course website.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $3,276.52 (+134.21%)
My buying and selling mining hardware paid off as this month. I was able to make some solid side income from Amazon and eBay. I even made my employee James $2,500 as he had me sell the hardware he had purchased to start mining. I made a video explaining how I bet on Mining Hardware in January over Cryptocurrency, and it paid! I put this under other income because this is not a sustainable side income that will continue on. I am only able to sell mining hardware so long as there is a huge supply and demand issue. This revenue does not include what paid off my mining hardware. I was able to pay off all of my mining hardware with the profits and have money left over, which is what I have reported here, otherwise, this number would have been much larger. I will explain this more in the side income report video I will post to my YouTube Channel.

Investments

This is a new category that I am not including in my side income revenue because these are investments. In my opinion, these investments will not become income until I cash them out. In the future, I may break this out on its own as I have more content for this area. I have been investing on my own for a few years but I have not really taken it very seriously until late last year.

Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $6,550.43 (-68.62%)
In December I sold off all stocks that were not performing outstanding to fund the purchase of mining equipment for resale. My original holdings before the selloff were at $22,000 as of December 1st. I will talk about it more, but I am glad that I did. I would not have seen the huge drop in the Stock Market that happened in February. I invest in the Stock Market using the Robinhood App. I will be talking more about how I use this app on my personal YouTube channel and the AltCast YouTube Channel.

Cryptocurrency – Holdings: 4,039.42 (0.0%)
Up until 2/8/2018 I held my crypto in various wallets with no simple way to get metrics on the performance of my holdings as the market fluctuates and new payouts from the mining operations are deposited. I have since started a spreadsheet to keep track of my holdings. I should be able to better report on the performance going forward. If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

What a way to start off 2018! I am excited to see where things go. I have prepared myself for a much lower February but I do not plan on letting grass grow under my feet. With all of my mining equipment paid off, I can focus on sharing revenues from my mining operations as well. I am still working out how I am going to add that into this report as what I earn from mining I see more as an investment than I do actual revenue.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

Things are starting to get interesting as a lot changed this month. It is December, so most of my product affiliate links saw more action than normal but I also dove in head first into Cryptocurrency Mining. As I write this I am thinking back on what I was thinking when I decided to start investing in Crypto Coins and in Mining. I was a little scared, but I knew that I would miss the boat if I didn’t start right away.

In December I made a lot of changes to my investments. I don’t typically include investments as side income because I look at my investments as a long-term growth strategy. My strategy for buying and selling stocks is to continue to grow that portfolio into something I can use for retirement. The stock market has been good to me in 2017 but the growth is nothing compared to what has happened in Cryptocurrency in the last month.

I talked a lot about my mindset in a video I filmed on Building My First Ethereum Mining Rig, but I saw Cryptocurrency Mining as a less risky way to get into Cryptocurrency. If I was wrong, I could at least sell the mining rig or its components. Currently, I am posting weekly update videos to a new YouTube channel where I focus more on Cryptocurrency and Mining. It’s called AltCast. My goal is to talk about alternative forms of investing as well. Right now my topics are mostly Cryptocurrency and Crypto Mining.

I want to talk about the crazy things that have been happening in January so far but this blog is about December so I am going to try to stay on topic. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. I will try to share as much as I can there as it happens.

Towards the end of the month, I filmed a course titled How to Build an Ethereum Mining Rig. I had built a few at this point and had been answering a lot of questions online. The course went live a few days before the new year so it only sold a few copies. I’m excited to see how the course performs through January.

Traffic to the YouTube channels continues to grow. State of Tech and the new AltCast got most of the attention in December even though I wanted to give Ditch Auto more time. State of Tech has seen some growth due to the mining specific videos I posted. I thought about doing more mining content for State of Tech but I didn’t want to get too far off topic so I created AltCast to discuss investing and Cryptocurrency.

With that said, here is my Side Income Report for December of 2017. I am looking forward to seeing where things go in 2018 as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

December 2017 side income total – $3705.40 (+16.98%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $1351.56 (+21.33%) Subscribers: 24167 (+6.48%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. There were a few videos added to the channel this month but we did add a bunch of videos right at the end of October that was specific to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Those videos tend to take off a few months after they go live.

Ditch Auto – $595.45 (+36.25%) Subscribers: 20692 (+7.28)
This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials. Not a lot of content has been added to Ditch Auto this month.

Jerad Hill – $36.07 (-0%) Subscribers: 4626 (+0.37%)
This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. I do plan to do a lot more on my personal channel in the near future. I am just trying to decide what I want my focus to be there.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $840.51 (+45.15%)
With August being back to school, it makes sense that these numbers would be higher. The majority of the product links I have out there are for technology and camera equipment. We have not put out much content that includes product links so I don’t expect much growth here until Christmas shopping begins.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $155.33 (+31.99%)
I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Jerad’s Courses

Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $74.00 (+100%)
This is a new side income category. I have had this website live for a few years now but there has not been any paid courses on it until now. I expect a lot of growth here as I continue to produce content.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $7.49 (-111.91%)
I only have one paid course currently and that course is getting old. It needs to be refreshed. I have plans later this month to get new courses out that will be paid and to revise a couple of my existing courses to drive some return traffic to my instructor page.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $645 (-34.62%)
I turned off a couple of sources of this other income that I did not plan to maintain any longer. These sources really only brought in $20-75 per source and took an average of 3 hours per source. Not a good return on invested time, so they are gone.

I am excited about what 2018 will bring. I have a renewed vigor for improving my side income and a new goal I will announce with the January Side Income Report. I also plan to start filming some videos for my personal YouTube channel to discuss more on how I produce content that leads to the side income I am reporting in these blogs.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

As predicted, November was a bit better than prior months. This happens often during the holidays. The biggest boost I saw in my side-income during the holidays was when the Hoverboard got popular. There was a couple of months where I was getting $2,500 to $4,000 just from Amazon Affiliate links alone. That died off of course as does any fad. Going into this holiday season I do not have any content that is somewhat going viral to help generate revenue. I have a few ideas that just are not going to make it in time unless I end up with spare time in December.

One area that saw decent growth was the Google Adsense links. Due to my recent hire, a lot of content was created for two of my websites that I have brought new traffic to those sites. Though there was only a small amount of growth in regards to the cost of producing that content, that new content will live on for months and hopefully will return on the investment.

This month I started looking into Cryptocurrency mining. I am very interested in mining Ethereum (ETH). I will be building a mining rig early December so there will be a new category in my side-income report. I plan to track what I have mined, it’s growth and the fluctuation in the market. Should be interesting to follow.

So let’s take a look at the report for the month of November 2017.

November 2017 side income total – $3124.74 (+32.44%)

YouTube

StateOfTech – $1091.08 (+32.59%) Subscribers: 21135 (+4.86%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. There were a few videos added to the channel this month but we did add a bunch of videos right at the end of October that was specific to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Those videos tend to take off a few months after they go live.

Ditch Auto – $412.74 (+21.94) Subscribers: 19238 (+5.71)
This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials. Not a lot of content has been added to Ditch Auto this month.

Jerad Hill – $36.02 (-6.15) Subscribers: 4592 (+0.20%)
This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. I do plan to do a lot more on my personal channel in the near future. I am just trying to decide what I want my focus to be there.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Product Links – $530.89 (+57.02%)
With August being back to school, it makes sense that these numbers would be higher. The majority of the product links I have out there are for technology and camera equipment. We have not put out much content that includes product links so I don’t expect much growth here until Christmas shopping begins.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense links/display – $112.49 (+48.73%)
I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Udemy.Com

Paid courses on Udemy – $26.52 (+124.18%)
I only have one paid course currently and that course is getting old. It needs to be refreshed. I have plans later this month to get new courses out that will be paid and to revise a couple of my existing courses to drive some return traffic to my instructor page.

Other Income

Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $915 (+33.0%)
I turned off a couple of sources of this other income that I did not plan to maintain any longer. These sources really only brought in $20-75 per source and took an average of 3 hours per source. Not a good return on invested time, so they are gone.

Overall I am pretty impressed with this month considering the low effort. As I mentioned before, the holidays often boost these numbers. It is much more challenging to maintain these numbers during the rest of the year. I am sure December will be good and will probably be a decent month assuming the mining of Ethereum (ETH) goes well.

I plan to do some filming early in the month to try and get a few videos that would make sense for the holidays done, but I am not sure if I will have time. Hill Media Group is keeping me pretty busy going into December. Unless that lets up a bit, the December income report will just be true passive income.